Bharara on the premature end of Cuomo's ethics commission

ALBANY—Preet Bharara, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District, said on Thursday that the ethics commission empaneled by Governor Andrew Cuomo last year “was disbanded before its time."

“Nine months may be the proper and natural gestational period for a child,” he told WNYC's Brian Lehrer, but Bharara said it's not enough time for a public corruption case to “mature.”

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The New York Timesreported Wednesday evening that Bharara would take possession of files from the Moreland Commission to Investigate Public Corruption, after Governor Cuomo announced he would dismantle the commission after passage of the state’s budget.

Cuomo administration officials said the commission was no longer needed, because it had been empaneled solely to convince recalcitrant legislators to pass a slate of ethics reforms, some of which were included in the budget passed on April 1 of this year.

But in an unusually public rebuke of the governor’s decision, Bharara said in letters to the commission's chairmen, obtained by the Times, that Cuomo’s decision to disband the panel “gives the appearance, although I am sure this is not the intent, that investigations potentially significant to the public interest have been bargained away as part of the negotiated arrangement between legislative and executive leaders.”

“We sent letters upon finding out that a very important body was being decommissioned prematurely,” Bharara told Lehrer on Thursday. The commissioners of the Moreland Commission agreed that “someone should get all the files and all the leads” from their investigation, and the commissioners “determined that the best place for that to happen was in my office,” Bharara said.

Bharara said the governor’s decision to shut down the commission had raised questions, particularly because Cuomo's trumpeting of the new commission led Bharara and other law enforcement officials to believe that its work would result in referrals of criminal investigations, as well as a final report the commission said it would produce by 2015.

When the commission was created, “it was done with a lot of fanfare,” Bharara said.

“And it was done in a way to make the public believe it had an active ongoing investigation some of which would or should result in criminal charges,” he said.

When such an investigation is “unceremoniously shut down prematurely,” he said, “I think thinking people want to know why that happened.”

At least one anonymous Moreland Commissioner told the Times that Cuomo administration officials had interfered with the investigative body’s work, seeking to delay subpoenas or questioning why commissioners sought information from certain people. Cuomo held private meetings with two of the commissioners last fall, according to records of his schedule.

Lehrer asked Bharara if those details warranted an ethics investigation into the actions of Cuomo and his aides.

“I don’t know what all the facts are there,” Bharara said. He said his office will review all the materials turned over by the commissioners.

Lehrer repeated his question to Bharara about whether he would look into the governor’s actions.

Bharara was noncommittal.

“I’m not going to prejudge what we’ll be looking at, what we’ll be investigating,” he said.

Bharara said it was unclear what the case files would contain.

“If there are cases to bring, we’ll bring them,” he said. “We just want to get our hands on the files.”